Today, now more than ever, people are identifying the issues and accepted norms in today’s modern world and linking them back to George Orwell’s acclaimed novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Apparently, what was once a detailed description of a distant but possible future, has now become a reality. The accuracy of Orwell’s insights has startled the literary world with most having very similar correlations today. Yet, while we praise Orwell’s apparent wisdom and intuition, there is still one important element of his creation that does not correlate into today’s society. The representation of women in Nineteen Eighty-Four is disconcerting and the unintentional warning it illustrates does not conform to what we already think about Orwell’s insights.

What are women other than tools to the continuity of humankind? In the backdrop of George Orwell’s totalitarian state, where humanity has been stripped to nothing but a skeleton of what it once was, the apparent bones of the role of women are unearthed. It’s interesting to see that when society has been shrunk to its fundamental components, women are recognised only for the potential of their wombs and the desirability of their sexuality. “girls in full bloom […] and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who showed you what the girls would be like in ten years’ time,”. Women are also presented as only mere extensions of their husbands, “It was Mrs Parsons, the wife of a neighbour on the same floor”. It would seem that they are born with predetermined futures that all end in wifehood and the ‘duties’ that come with it. The only attributes that differentiate them from their counterparts still ultimately belong to the men that already control everything else.

However, among the Party, whom protagonist Winston is a part of, intimate relations are prohibited except for the arranged marriages. “For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.“. Therefore, with women having been stripped of their only attractive qualities, they have become hated. “He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so,“. For their desirability is useless and taunting and without the means of exploiting it, men find them detestable.

Not only are women perceived as meaningless in this text but also gullible. As if it’s in a woman’s nature to believe everything a man says and not have the competence to think any differently. “It was always the women […] who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”. This quote perfectly shows this disrespect, by insulting them and treating them as if they are only beings of poor judgement and no intuition. I for one find the term “bigoted adherents” delightfully hypocritical as the only bigoted ones in this novel are the men themselves, placing biased stereotypes on their own counterparts. And this prejudice is not just directed towards one individual but all. “It was always the women,” You can practically hear the words dripping with disdain and condemnation.

Yet, this discourtesy is not to be blamed on Orwell alone. Entire cultures have been based around this primitive discrimination and have been for thousands of years. Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in the late 1940s, post World War II. The second world war saw many progressive changes for women, with countries like America in states of emergency and a growing need for a larger workforce. Women began taking jobs in more male-dominated areas and neglecting the age-old expectations for them to stay at home and focus only on getting the housework done and looking after the children. This sudden imbalance in society caused many outrages and criticisms. “Male coworkers interpreted the completion of physically demanding and skilled tasks by women as an encroachment on “their” work, and some men responded with harassment and resistance towards their female counterparts […] these working women threatened to uproot the prevailing ideal of male providers and female homemakers and caretakers.“[1]. The distress created ultimately led to women and men having to work separately and women earning significantly less to placate the complaining men. The patriarchal culture at the time could seemingly not fathom the idea of women being able to do the same work that men could do.

This new development, in turn, has affected Orwell’s writing. While the warning about the unfortunate treatment of women in the future appears to be unintentional, it seems it is not the only warning concerning women in this text. Nineteen Eighty-Four also lets us glimpse into one of the many apprehensions of the time of its publication. In the 1940s, men were wary of women taking over jobs that for centuries had been exclusive to men and the thought of having to work alongside a woman in such a job clearly did a number on the society. For what did it mean for men if women, who were good for nothing except childbearing and looking after a household, started sharing the same skills as them? Cleary for many, this did not benefit their egos. In Nineteen Eighty-Four women worked alongside men in the Party and subsequently were treated with silent ridicule. “He had imagined her a fool like all the rest them,“. With the common opinion that the norms upon which the Party operated were despicable, the fact that women worked on almost equal ground with men in the novel shows how much disapproval such a system would receive. Orwell is warning his readers that a society that lets women join the ranks of men, is offensive and unacceptable. It would seem that the so-called threat surrounding women actually becoming capable and accomplished was large enough to warrant a bitter scrutiny of the subject in this dystopian novel.

Thankfully, such a future did not come to pass for women, and we are currently living in the most progressive age of human history. Equality for all women is a running cause and a millennium of oppression and discrimination is close to drawing its final breath. Women all around the world are driving their own futures. For example, in the UK the number of female engineers, a profession that historically has been male-dominated, has doubled in the last ten years and they represent over 10% of engineering professionals [2]. The number of women in senior management roles is also at its highest yet at 30% and 87% of businesses around the world now have at least one women in such a position [3]. Our current society is proof that women leading their own lives in the world is nothing but advantageous for building a better future. Orwell may have had some accurate predictions about our modern world but unfortunately, his old-fashioned mindset could not appear to grasp the importance of women in making such a future possible. The fact that we have proved Orwell’s outmoded caution unnecessary confirms just how far we have come.

Even if Orwell never intended for this insight to develop, he has still created a lens through which we can appreciate all the privileges that we have perilously gained over the last few decades and the long and inevitably challenging road ahead of us. As a woman myself, with plans to pursue a career in engineering, knowing that only a generation or two ago it would have been impossible encourages me and many like me even more. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a masterpiece, with shrewd applicability to the time of its creation and today. Orwell’s enlightening misogyny is an important yet objectionable detail in this novel, but these essential flaws prove undoubtedly that we are ascending into a better world.

[1] https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/gender-home-front

[2] https://www.wisecampaign.org.uk/statistics/2019-workforce-statistics-one-million-women-in-stem-in-the-uk/

[3] https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-management/